A little more spiritual enlightenment.
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Verbatim recurring item in The Guardian Q&A; two fully readable publisher-hosted respondent pages establish institutional recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Matthew Roberson, GQ, 23 January 2026 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 211 →A dog, though my husband would prefer a cat.
A potion that would make me fit, thin, healthy and useful.
I could be kinder to myself.
More from Alex Honnold
View profile →I think when I was younger, I had a lot of the fears that, that you expect from people. Like I was kind of afraid of spiders and things like that. And I think with, you know, years of dealing with fear nonstop, they've all sort of fallen away. I, I mean, I guess my greatest fear is like public embarrassment or public performance, or like what I said earlier about opera singing I'm like, that is still for sure that would be a nightmare. And like, yeah, I could do it. But I would be so bummed.
I think I’m most proud of the speed record on Moonlight, because I broke a team record by myself by climbing it in a different style. It feels more “new” to me than simply climbing a route a little quicker, which is what all my other speed records are.
No, I don’t really worry that much when I sleep. I mean, the stuff that I get stressed about is all like real life stuff with, you know, dealing with email and responding to calls and like, you know, hustling and I don’t know, like doing my taxes. You know, like all the stuff that I’m just like not good at.
Yeah. I, I think an interesting thing with that is that like, is it even failure if you've learned from it and you've taken those lessons onto your next project or the next thing that you're working on? And it's like, that's not necessarily a failure. It's all just part of a long-term learning process.
No, I use like a 2-liter bottle, just like some random plastic bottle. And I basically use it over and over until it’s like this is repulsive, and then I recycle it. And then I move on to another.
And you know, then you can just take that breath and be like, okay, time to--time to reset, you know, like, relax your grip a little bit, take in what you're doing and start again.
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